Actually that’s not true. I had a fiber optic phone line in the 80s in England. (passive optical network, aka TPON infrastructure.) It spanked the US system.
That was being rolled out by the nationalised BT, and Thatcher sold BT off. Surprise surprise, the privatised BT put the kybosh on TPON and we had to wait over 20 years for their Openreach division to retart rolling out fibre.
Us Brits had maglev decades ago, and tilting trains in the 70s. Bloody statism, eh?!
Privatisation killed them both off. If we want tilting high speed trains now, we have to pay another country.
Regardless, my point was that deregulated land lines in the USA were less expensive, were almost 100% reliable, and were more widely subscribed than any other country in the world.
Remember the last time the US Congress decided that we needed to imitate European telecoms?
Credit card chip readers. Literally billions of dollars were spent to replace our entire electronic payment system.
Two years later, I got my first RFID Visa card. I have not used a chip reader in a major store in close to ten years.